The unfortunately cute and alliterative title of longtime Bay Area radio personality, author and teacher "Scoop" Nisker's new book, "The Big Bang, the Buddha and the Baby Boom," may deter some would-be readers; how many more navel-gazing memoirs of the '60s generation do we really need? But such skepticism can be put aside in Nisker's favor. In relating this brief, almost breezy autobiographical tale of the past 40 or so years, mostly lived in the Bay Area, he minimizes narcissism in favor of skillful storytelling and self- deprecating humor.

Nisker has often had a front-row seat, if not a place onstage, at many landmark events and trends. After a boyhood as a rare "nice Jewish boy from Nebraska" and a deft dodge of the Vietnam War draft, he felt the call of '60s counterculture freedom and experimentation and visited California in 1967 for the legendary Monterey Pop festival. A confirmed Californian from then on, he landed a job as a newscaster at the seminal countercultural San Francisco radio station KSAN.

"I really wanted to be a beatnik when I came to San Francisco, but I was too late to make the scene, so I was assigned to the hippies instead," he recalls. KSAN was the airwave beacon of hippiedom and featured free-form political and musical commentary, reporting from the riots at Berkeley's People's Park, melded with a heady stew of drugs and spirit-affirming interviews with icons such as John Lennon and Timothy Leary.

"We were tribal radio, filling the heads of American youth with a call to rebellion and celebration. . . . Listening to tapes from those days, I am amazed that KSAN was able to continue broadcasting," he marvels. His recollections of his decadelong stint there is an entertaining slice from a now long bygone era.

Nisker was on KSAN until 1979, and in the early 1980s continued as a radio commentator on the more commerical KFOG. There Nisker was reprimanded -- in an unintentionally hysterical memo reprinted here -- for "the tendency to sound too much like we're doing news in 1969." By then he was already disillusioned and embarked on a path as an author ("Crazy Wisdom," "Buddha's Nature"), editor of the Buddhist journal Inquiring Mind and teacher of meditation.

The hippie history Nisker participated in has been described ad nauseam by many authors. Here the events and trends are really the context for Nisker's story of how he evolved into a confirmed and renowned contemporary Buddhist figure. As with many in his generation, he became fascinated with Eastern teachings and in 1970 traveled to India, "hot on the trail of transformation." He felt this pull even though the Vietnam War still raged. "But the goal was vague in my own mind, and often during my travels I felt like a self-indulgent imperialist, taking advantage of my privileged birth to seek personal happiness," he reflects.

In India Nisker did his first meditation retreat, hoping that finding some kind of cosmic bliss "would take, at the most, maybe a few months." But the subsequent three decades have taught him that spiritual progress is vastly more gradual and that indeed the path may be the goal. "Meditation does not make you into someone else," he discovered. What can happen, he reports, is more calm self-acceptance: "We find that we don't have to take our personality so personally."

Nisker delves a bit into the theoretical science of meditation that he explored more fully in "Buddha's Nature." "If Gautama Buddha were around today,

I am certain he would sprinkle his teachings with research findings from the evolutionary sciences," writes Nisker, and so he does likewise. Our desires are programmed into us, he notes, and thus our consumerism and confusion when our desires fail to satisfy us. "I continue to get caught up in desires and identified with my personal drama," he laments. "But at least now I can blame it all on evolution." More seriously, he summarizes that "ironically, Western science became one of our primary gateways to mysticism."

Although this is a quasi-spiritual biography of Nisker's self and generation, it remains a socially engaged one as well. Much of his book is a gentle but heartfelt critique of modern civilization's priorities and transgressions. Consumption is choking planet Earth, poverty and inequality are the rule rather than the exception, and wars happen. Nisker compares America to Gibbons' declining Roman Empire, and perhaps true to Buddhist form, says, "If decline is to be America's eventual fate, then perhaps we shouldn't fight it."

Many hippies flirted with Eastern spirituality, but far fewer stuck with it.

Many also gave up on their early ideals in favor of seductive materialism. Political activism, for many, has come to seem like a futile luxury. But none of those concessions overtook Nisker, who calls himself a "cynic in recovery" and who remains an activist. "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own," was Nisker's trademark radio sign-off, and he has lived, to an admirable extent, true to that admonition.